Enterprise software systems receive, generate, and store data related to many aspects of an enterprise. Reporting tools may access the data and present the data in a variety of graphic visualizations, including different types and formats of graphs. The visualizations might be used by consumers thereof to gain insights into the operations of the enterprise and/or other purposes.
The data may be represented by different data structures (e.g., objects) that may be classified as measures (e.g., revenue, taxes) having values that can be used in calculations, and dimensions (e.g., year, country) defining categories into which the measures can be filtered, grouped, and labeled for analysis and reporting.
Content creators may define visualizations to include presentations of values of one or more measures of the enterprise's data arranged according to various dimensions of the data, where the created visualizations may subsequently be consumed by one or more content consumers. Conventionally, content creators might create visualizations with a focus on including the desired dimensions and measures (i.e., content) in the visualizations. The particular manner in which the visualizations are presented for consumption might not be done in a consistent manner. In some scenarios, different visualizations might render the same dimensions differently, even in some contexts where the different visualizations are related or associated with each other in some regard. For example, two related visualizations (Chart 1, Chart 2) including the dimension of a country might have the same dimension (e.g., Country=U.S.) rendered differently in the two visualizations (e.g., in Chart 1 a bar graph representation for a value in the U.S. might be red while Chart 2 presents a bar graph representation for a value in the U.S. in blue and a value corresponding to the country of China in red). Such variation in the rendered presentation of the dimensions may very well introduce confusion, or at least reduce the clarity, of rendered visualizations.
Conventional reporting tools provide many types of visualizations for graphically presenting values of one or more measures. However, more efficient systems and methods are desired to generate consistent visualizations.